Why realists must reject normative quietism

The last two decades have seen a surge of support for normative quietism: most notably, from Dworkin (1996, 2011), Nagel (1996, 1997), Parfit (2011a, b) and Scanlon (1998, 2014). Detractors like Enoch (2011) and McPherson (2011) object that quietism is incompatible with realism about normativity. The resulting debate has stagnated somewhat. In this paper I explore and defend a more promising way of developing that objection: I’ll argue that if normative quietism is true, we can create reasons out of thin air, so normative realists must reject normative quietism.     

Glymour and Quine on Theoretical Equivalence

Glymour (1970, 1977, 1980) and Quine (1975) propose two different formal criteria for theoretical equivalence. In this paper we examine the relationships between these criteria.     

God’s Melancholia

Donald Capps’s (Capps 1997, 2001, 2002a, b) male melancholia theory has been of interest to me during the past few years (Carlin 2003, 2006, 2007), and Capps (2004, 2007a, b) himself has been publishing more on the topic. In his psychobiographical book on Jesus, Capps (2000) notes that psychologists of religion have been reluctant to psychoanalyze Jesus, and here I note that even fewer have been willing to diagnose God, one recent exception being J. Harold Ellens (2007). In this article, I explore the melancholia issue further, this time applying the theory to God by means of theological concepts that deal with the Trinity and the passion of God. And while this article is playful (Pruyser 1974; cf. Dykstra 2001), the upshot is more serious: If men are incurably religious and melancholic, as Capps argues, and if men, by and large, are the creators of religion, wouldn’t one expect to find traces of this melancholy in religion, particularly in its sacred texts and doctrines? By identifying these tendencies in religion, especially in God, the pastoral psychologist, I believe, is helping contemporary Christian men—especially fathers and sons—recognize their own melancholy selves and, perhaps, helping them get along a little better.     

The Varieties of Moral Improvement,or why Metaethical Constructivism must Explain Moral Progress

Among the available metaethical views, it would seem that moral realism—in particular moral naturalism—must explain the possibility of moral progress. We see this in the oft-used argument from disagreement against various moral realist views. My suggestion in this paper is that, surprisingly, metaethical constructivism has at least as pressing a need to explain moral progress. I take moral progress to be, minimally, the opportunity to access and to act in light of moral facts of the matter, whether they are mind-independent or -dependent. For the metaethical constructivist, however, I add that moral progress ought also mean that agents come to be or could come to be motivated to act in light of the right kind of moral judgments. Together I take this to mean that, for all forms of constructivism, moral progress must be explained as a form of moral improvement, or agents aspiring to be better sorts of moral agents. In what moral improvement consists differs for various forms of constructivism. Here I distinguish between three different versions of metaethical constructivism: Humean constructivists as represented by Street (2008, 2010, 2012), Kantian constitutivist constructivists as represented by Korsgaard, and constructivists about practical reason as represented by Carla Bagnoli (2002, 2013). I conclude by showing that only constructivism as a view about practical reason can fully account for moral progress qua the opportunity for moral improvement.     

The Double Standard at Sexual Debut: Gender,Sexual Behavior and Adolescent Peer Acceptance

In this paper, a vision for the future of U.S. NCAA Division I university sport is presented. It is argued that this context could serve as the place where performance “excellence” is rooted in caring. However, U.S. sport at this level must become purposefully structured to include educational components related to moral thinking, feeling, and behaving. Otherwise, it will continue to foster a type of disconnected or “game reasoning” mentality, building “characters” vs. character (Shields & Bredemeier, 1995). Using U.S.-focused feminism as the necessary first intervention, the paper is situated within a care moral orientation (e.g., Gilligan 1979, 1982) as well as sport psychology moral development scholarship (e.g., Bredemeier 1992; Fisher 1993; Kavussanu 2008; Oglesby 1990; Solomon 1993; Stephens 1993). A brief review of the current state of affairs in U.S. NCAA Division I university sport is presented first. Next, selected literature related to a care moral orientation and moral disconnection in U.S. psychology and sport psychology is highlighted. Finally, one vision of what a model of conscious, caring and connected U.S. NCAA Division I sport research and practice could look like is offered. Specifically, those who have the power to influence sport would develop character and the related skills of moral consciousness, caring, and connection, undergirded by feminist moral principles and reflective practice. Feminist (and all) sport psychology professionals are in a prime position to engage with sport constituents to enhance athletes’ overall experience, where character does matter, and, so, too, does performance.     

The personal and the subpersonal in the theory of mind debate

It is a widely accepted assumption within the philosophy of mind and psychology that our ability for complex social interaction is based on the mastery of a common folk psychology, that is to say that social cognition consists in reasoning about the mental states of others in order to predict and explain their behavior. This, in turn, requires the possession of mental-state concepts, such as the concepts belief and desire. In recent years, this standard conception of social cognition has been called into question by proponents of so-called ‘direct-perception’ approaches to social cognition (e.g., Gallagher 2001, 2005, 2007, 2012; Gallagher and Hutto 2008; Zahavi 2005, 2011) and by those who argue that the ‘received view’ implies a degree of computational complexity that is implausible (e.g., Bermúdez 2003; Apperly and Butterfill 2009). In response, it has been argued that these attacks on the classical view of social cognition have no bite at the subpersonal level of explanation, and that it is the latter which is at issue in the debate in question (e.g., Herschbach 2008; Spaulding 2010, 2015). In this paper, I critically examine this response by considering in more detail the distinction between personal and subpersonal level explanations. There are two main ways in which the distinction has been developed (Drayson 2014). I will argue that on either of these, the response proposed by defenders of the received view is unconvincing. This shows that the dispute between the standard conception and alternative approaches to mindreading is a dispute concerning personal-level explanations - what is at stake in the debate between proponents of the classical view of social cognition and their critics is how we, as persons, navigate our social world. I will conclude by proposing a pluralistic approach to social cognition, which is better able to do justice to the multi-faceted nature of our social interactions as well as being able to account for recent empirical findings regarding the social cognitive abilities of young infants.     

Solving Smullyan Puzzles with Formal Systems

Solving numeric, logic and language puzzles and paradoxes is common within a wide community of high school and university students, fact witnessed by the increasing number of books published by mathematicians such as Martin Gardner (popular books as old as Gardner in Aha! insight. W. H. Freeman & Co., London, 1978, Wheels, life and other mathematical amusements. W H Freeman & Co., London, 1985), Douglas Hofstadter [in one of the best popular science books on paradoxes (Hofstadter in Godel, escher, bach: an eternal golden braid, Penguin, London, 2000)], inspired by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems), Patrick Hughes and George Brecht (see Hughes and Brecht in Vicious circles and infinity, an anthology of paradoxes. Penguin Books, London, 1993) and Raymond M. Smullyan (the most well known being Smullyan in Forever undecided, puzzle guide to godel. Oxford Paperbacks, Oxford 1988, To Mock a Mockingbird and other logic puzzles. Oxford Paperbacks, Oxford 2000, The lady or the tiger? And other logic puzzles. Dover Publications Inc., Mineola 2009), inter alia. Books by Smullyan (such as Smullyan 1988, 2000) are, however, much more involved, since they introduce learning trajectories and strategies across several subjects of mathematical logic, as difficult as combinatorial logic (see, e.g., Smullyan 2000), computability theory (see Smullyan 1988), and proof theory (see Smullyan 1988, 2009). These books provide solutions to their suggested exercises. Both statements and their solutions are written in the natural language, introducing some informal algorithms. As an exercise in Mathematics we wonder if an easy proof system could be devised to solve the amusing equations proposed by Smullyan in his books. Moreover, university students of logic could well train themselves in constructing deductive systems to solve puzzles instead of a non-uniform treatment one by one. In this paper, addressing students, we introduce one such formal systems, a tableaux approach able to provide the solutions to the puzzles involving either propositional logic, first order logic, or aspect logic. Let the reader amuse herself or himself!     

Power,Situation, and Character: A Confucian-Inspired Response to Indirect Situationist Critiques

Indirect situationist critiques of virtue ethics grant that virtue exists and is possible to acquire, but contend that given the low probability of success in acquiring it, a person genuinely interested in behaving as morally as possible would do better to rely on situationist strategies - or, in other words, strategies of environmental or ecological engineering or control (Doris, 2002, 1998; see also Levy 2012). In this paper, I develop a partial answer to this critique drawn from work in early Confucian ethics and in contemporary philosophy and psychology. From early Confucian ethics, I lean on the concept of li, or ritual. Ritual represents both a set of situational manipulations that are especially effective at directly producing moral behavior and at indirectly cultivating virtue over time, and also a virtue that consists of facility with and expertise in these situational manipulations (Mower 2013; Slingerland, 2011; Sarkissian, 2010; and Hutton, 2006). Appealing to the particular example of social power, I then argue that one is justified in attempting to acquire virtue if one (a) knows that one will frequently encounter circumstances in which purely situationist strategies lose effectiveness, (b) if these circumstances also carry moral urgency: the risk of great harm or opportunity for great benefit to others is high, and (c) if utilizing the potent combination of situationist strategies and virtue envisioned by the early Confucians as ritual is possible.     

Probabilistic Opinion Pooling with Imprecise Probabilities

The question of how the probabilistic opinions of different individuals should be aggregated to form a group opinion is controversial. But one assumption seems to be pretty much common ground: for a group of Bayesians, the representation of group opinion should itself be a unique probability distribution (Madansky [44]; Lehrer and Wagner [34]; McConway Journal of the American Statistical Association, 76(374), 410–414, [45]; Bordley Management Science, 28(10), 1137–1148, [5]; Genest et al. The Annals of Statistics, 487–501, [21]; Genest and Zidek Statistical Science, 114–135, [23]; Mongin Journal of Economic Theory, 66(2), 313–351, [46]; Clemen and Winkler Risk Analysis, 19(2), 187–203, [7]; Dietrich and List [14]; Herzberg Theory and Decision, 1–19, [28]). We argue that this assumption is not always in order. We show how to extend the canonical mathematical framework for pooling to cover pooling with imprecise probabilities (IP) by employing set-valued pooling functions and generalizing common pooling axioms accordingly. As a proof of concept, we then show that one IP construction satisfies a number of central pooling axioms that are not jointly satisfied by any of the standard pooling recipes on pain of triviality. Following Levi (Synthese, 62(1), 3–11, [39]), we also argue that IP models admit of a much better philosophical motivation as a model of rational consensus.     

Modus Ponens Under the Restrictor View

There is a renewed debate about modus ponens. Strikingly, the recent counterexamples in Cantwell (Theoria, 74, 331–351 2008), Dreier (2009) and MacFarlane and Kolodny (The Journal of Philosophy, 107, 115–143 2010) are generated by restricted readings of the ‘if’-clause. Moreover, it can be argued on general grounds that the restrictor view of conditionals developed in Kratzer (1986) and Lewis (1975) leads to counterexamples to modus ponens (cp. Charlow Synthese, 190, 2291–2323 2013; Khoo Philosophical Studies, 166, 153–64 2013). This paper provides a careful analysis of modus ponens within the framework of the restrictor view. Despite appearances to the contrary, there is a robust sense in which modus ponens is valid, owing to the fact that conditionals do not only allow for restricted readings but have bare interpretations, too.     

Mental Illness Publications in Major Pastoral Care Journals from 1950 to 2003

The issue of mental illness has been of considerable interest to both of us over the past several years. The first author has taught a course on the subject for a decade, and his recent publications on the subject include several articles on John Nash (Capps, 2003b, 2004a,b, 2005b), a book on mental illness for pastoral care professionals (2005a), and an article on whether William James was a patient at McLean Hospital (2007). The second author has had experience with the mentally ill through his pastoral work at Trenton Psychiatrist Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, a mental hospital with a rather checkered history (see Scull, 2005), and in Scotland and has also written an article on John Nash (Carlin, 2006). This shared interest, together with evidence that serious mental illness in America has been steadily increasing (Torrey &; Miller, 2001, pp. 295–299), caused us to wonder what sort of attention mental illness has received in our major journals of pastoral care from 1950 to the present. Specifically, has this attention kept pace with the increase in mental illness?     

Migration Flows and Quality of Life in a Metropolitan Area: the Case of Barcelona-Spain

The phenomenon of human migration is certainly not new and it has been studied from a variety of perspectives. Yet, the attention on human migration and its determinant has not been fading over time as confirmed by recent contributions (see for instance Cushing and Poot 2004 and Rebhun and Raveh 2006). In this paper we combine the recent theoretical contributions by Douglas (1997) and Wall (2001) with the methodological advancements of Guimarães et al. (2000, 2003) to model inter-municipal migration flows in the Barcelona area. In order to do that, we employ two different types of count models, i.e. the Poisson and negative binomial and compare the estimations obtained. Our results show that, even after controlling for the traditional migration factors, QoL (measured with a Composite Index which includes numerous aspects and also using a list of individual variables) is an important determinant of short distance migration movements in the Barcelona area.     

Lost in Translation: Religion in The Public Sphere

This paper proposes a Wittgenstein-inspired critique of the prism of translation that frames the recent literature about the debate between Rawls and Habermas on the role of religious reasons in the public sphere (Habermas 2008; Weithman 2006; Wolterstorff 1997). This debate originates with the introduction of Rawls’s proviso in his conception of the public use of reason (Rawls The University of Chicago Law Review, 64(3), 765-807, 1997), which consists in the “translation” of religious reasons into secular ones, which he thinks is necessary in order for religious reasons to be legitimate in the public sphere (Courtois Dialogue, 49, 91-112, 2010; Loobuyck and Rummens Ars disputandi: The Online Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 5, 237–249, 2011; Sikka The Review of Politics, 78, 91-116, 2016). Even though Wittgenstein is not himself concerned with religious pluralism as a political issue, there are numerous scholars who have discussed the political implications of his remarks (Gunnell Contemporary Political Theory, 12 80-101, 2013; Livingston Philosophy and Social Criticism, 33(6), 691–715, 2007; Moore Philosophy and Social Criticism, 36(9), 1113-1136 2010; Pohlhaus and Wright Political Theory, 30(6), 800–27, 2002). The thesis of this paper is that the interpretation proposed by Cora Diamond (2000) in regards to ethical and religious questions turns out to be a suitable way out of the “translation requirement”. According to this solution, if there is to be an understanding between secular and religious citizens on the basis of religious reasons, it should not rely on a “translation” but rather on mutual self-representation.     

Believable Visions of the Good: an Exploration of the Role of Pastoral Counselors in Promoting Resilience

Although adjustment after trauma is often positively associated with meaning, some studies challenge this connection (Bonanno, Memory, 21(1), 150–156, 2013; Silver and Updegraff 2013). In this article we elaborate on the relation between existential meaning and resilience. First, we conceptualize existential meaning—searching for and finding meaning in life—in terms of “orienting in moral space”, using the philosophical ideas of Taylor (1989), the psychological meaning-making model of Park (Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257–301, 2010), and existential theory. We argue that orienting systems in moral space are “believable visions of the good”. We then search recent literature on resilience—in particular literature in which the connection with meaning is challenged—for indications of a connection with existential meaning. We conclude that resilience necessarily comprises a “moral dimension” that is an adaptive process of (eventually) finding meaning in life. Finally, we discuss implications for the role that pastoral counselors, as professionals in the domain of existential meaning, may play in promoting resilience in organizations where employees regularly face existential issues like violence, suffering, and death.     

Deference,respect and intensionality

This paper is about the standard Reflection Principle (van Fraassen in J Philos 81(5):235–256, 1984) and the Group Reflection Principle (Elga in Nous 41(3):478–502, 2007; Bovens and Rabinowicz in Episteme 8(3):281–300, 2011; Titelbaum in Quitting certainties: a Bayesian framework modeling degrees of belief, OUP, Oxford, 2012; Hedden in Mind 124(494):449–491, 2015). I argue that these principles are incomplete as they stand. The key point is that deference is an intensional relation, and so whether you are rationally required to defer to a person at a time can depend on how that person and that time are designated. In this paper I suggest a way of completing the Reflection Principle and Group Reflection Principle, and I argue that so completed these principles are plausible. In particular, they do not fall foul of the Sleeping Beauty case (Elga in Analysis 60(2):143–147, 2000), the Cable Guy Paradox (Hajek in Analysis 65(286):112–119, 2005), Arntzenius’ prisoner cases (Arntzenius in J Philos, 100(7):356–370, 2003), or the Puzzle of the Hats (Bovens and Rabinowicz in Episteme 8(3):281–300, 2011).     

Agency,Chance, and the Scientific Status of Psychology

Psychologists generally reject the reductionist, physicalist, “nothing but” stance of the natural sciences. At the same time they consider their discipline a science and wonder why it does not enjoy the status (and funding) of the natural sciences. Ferguson American Psychologist, 70, 527-542 (2015), Lilienfeld American Psychologist, 67, 111-129 (2012), and Schwartz et al. American Psychologist, 71, 52-70 (2016) are among those who adopt a soft naturalism of nonreductive physicalism which declares, or implies, that when it comes to humans, there is more than what the natural sciences can unravel. They envision psychology as scientific in the epistemological sense of generating reproducible results, but reject the reductive ontology of science which currently points to the undeterminable chance of quantum theory as the closest physics has come to the beginnings and what might loosely be called the foundation of the universe (e.g., Bridgman Harper's, 158, 443-451 1929; Eddington 1948). The case made here is that any science, including a psychological one, must be based on a naturalist ontology. This implies restricting the term science to disciplines which not only meet epistemological criteria like reproducibility, but which also adopt—on the ontological level—the parsimonious assumption that at present it makes sense to think that “there is nothing but time and chance” (e.g., Cox and Forshaw 2011; Crease and Goldhaber 2014; Rorty 1989). From this perspective, psychology emerges as two distinct disciplines, one a natural science, the other a human science in the broad sense of science as scientia.     

No evidence for unethical amnesia for imagined actions: A failed replication and extension

In a recent study, Kouchaki and Gino (2016) suggest that memory for unethical actions is impaired, regardless of whether such actions are real or imagined. However, as we argue in the current study, their claim that people develop “unethical amnesia” confuses two distinct and dissociable memory deficits: one affecting the phenomenology of remembering and another affecting memory accuracy. To further investigate whether unethical amnesia affects memory accuracy, we conducted three studies exploring unethical amnesia for imagined ethical violations. The first study (N = 228) attempts to directly replicate the only study from Kouchaki and Gino (2016) that includes a measure of memory accuracy. The second study (N = 232) attempts again to replicate these accuracy effects from Kouchaki and Gino (2016), while including several additional variables meant to potentially help in finding the effect. The third study (N = 228) is an attempted conceptual replication using the same paradigm as Kouchaki and Gino (2016), but with a new vignette describing a different moral violation. We did not find an unethical amnesia effect involving memory accuracy in any of our three studies. These results cast doubt upon the claim that memory accuracy is impaired for imagined unethical actions. Suggestions for further ways to study memory for moral and immoral actions are discussed.     

The ‘Crucified’ Leader: Cynicism,Fantasies and Paradoxes in Education

In this paper we argue that transnational as well as national political demands and expectations on the educational field are contributing to (re)produce four ideological-based educational leadership discourses in the literature. In order to conceptualize these discourses, we turn to the work of Schmidt (Diagnosis I—Filosoferende eksperimenter. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 1999, On respect. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 2011) and Zizek (Mapping ideology. Verso, New York, 2000, The sublime object of ideology. Verso, New York, 2008a). On that basis we identify four dominant educational leadership discourses: (a) a personhood-based discourse, (b) a profession-based discourse, (c) a standard-based discourse, and (d) a resource-based discourse. These discourses have—as we will show—various consequences for the way we think and talk about education and educational leadership in our age. Using examples that stem from a project about educational leadership in Danish upper secondary school, we will illustrate how educational leaders’ beings and doings are ‘regulated’ by these discourses, which place them in a tension field where different and conflicting (ideological) fantasies seem to be played out. Then, we will discuss how these fantasies can be challenged and how we can think and speak more intellectually about education and educational leadership. By using the term intellectual we are referring to educational leaders’ ability as human beings to critically reflect on their contemporary doings and beings within and beyond the existing social order. Hopefully this can help them (and us) to establish new ways for discussing not only what educational leadership is and should be about, but also what it could be about.     

Why the Canberra plan won’t help you do serious metaphysics

Jackson (From metaphysics to ethics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998) argues that conceptual analysis plays a modest, albeit crucial, role in ‘serious metaphysics’: roughly, the project of demystifying phenomena we take to be mysterious by locating them in the natural world. This defence of conceptual analysis is associated with ‘the Canberra Plan’, a philosophical methodology that has its roots in the works of both Lewis (J Philos 67(13):427–446, 1970, Australas J Philos 50:249–258, 1972) and Jackson (Monist 77:93–110, 1994, 1998). There is, however, a distinction to be drawn between conceptual analysis, as it is typically employed in the Canberra plan, and a version of it defended by Jackson himself. In this paper, I elucidate this distinction, and employ examples from the history of science to argue the use of the former, but not the latter, incurs certain problems of conceptual change. Moreover, I also argue neither can be used to undertake serious metaphysics—the former because of the aforementioned problems, and the latter due to the machinery it employs to solve them.     

The Hidden Set-Theoretical Paradox of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Tractatus</Emphasis>

We are familiar with various set-theoretical paradoxes such as Cantor's paradox, Burali-Forti's paradox, Russell's paradox, Russell-Myhill paradox and Kaplan's paradox. In fact, there is another new possible set-theoretical paradox hiding itself in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1989). From the Tractatus’s Picture theory of language (hereafter LP) we can strictly infer the two contradictory propositions simultaneously: (a) the world and the language are equinumerous; (b) the world and the language are not equinumerous. I call this antinomy the world-language paradox. Based on a rigorous analysis of the Tractatus, with the help of the technical resources of Cantor’s naive set theory (Cantor in Mathematische Annalen, 46, 481–512, 1895, Mathematische Annalen, 49, 207–246, 1897) and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (hereafter ZFC) (Jech 2006: 3–15; Kunen 1992: xv–xvi; Bagaria 2008: 619–622), I outline the world-language paradox and assess the unique possible solution plan, i.e., the mathematical plan utilizing ‘infinity’. I conclude that Wittgenstein cannot solve the hidden set-theoretical paradox of the Tractatus successfully unless he gives up his finitism.